wHY bRING lOVE?

wHERE THERE IS HATRED...

Hatred of Jews—antisemitism—has been rising in Canada and around the world over the last decade or so. The explosion of hatred the followed the October 7 pogrom has brought the situation to a crisis.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters are suffering the double anguish of mourning the largest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, which occurred in the one land where they can feel safe, and seeing hatred directed at them in diaspora communities, including our own.

Jews now feel unloved, alone, and unsafe in our cities. They need police and security guards at their schools and synagogues. Businesses owned by Jews have been picketed and vandalized. Jewish students at universities have been targeted by protests calling for their genocide.

... BRING LOVE

It’s time to mobilize to bring love to our Jewish brothers and sisters in their hour of need.

We build on Catholic teaching on our relationship with the Jewish people. As the Church of the Gentiles, we have been grafted on to the tree of Israel (Romans 11:17).

We draw “sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles” (Nostra Aetate). The Jewish people are our beloved, elder brothers and sisters in faith, as Saint Pope John Paul II taught.

As such, it is not possible to be a Christian and an antisemite. Indeed we must commit ourselves to excising antisemitism from society, as Pope Francis said in 2018. In the face of the surge in antisemitism that followed the October 7 pogrom, the pope repeated this call, saying "We had hoped that 'never again' would be a refrain heard by the new generations, yet now we see that the path ahead requires ever closer collaboration to eradicate these phenomena."

The Prayer of St Francis tells us what to do in simple terms: “Where there is hatred, let me bring love”.

Our faith tells us that it is not enough not to hate. We are called to love our Jewish brothers and sisters, and in this atmosphere of terrible hatred, we must make that love manifest.

This is why we BRING LOVE.